Monday, December 27, 2010

Ah, sing me the song of climate change!
Jump on the jetstream, baby,
and let's fly into the stratosphere!
All around the world on the back of words
as clear as sparkling stars on the Northern skies!
Ah, horizontal, vertical, meandering -
Siberia, Eurasia, the Rockies:
it's so cold in Germany,
but we are (not) afraid to die
'cause global warming is in our mind, it's all in our mind.

All the beauty of meteorological prose that inspired this poem, find it here in this op-ed piece in the New York Times: 'Bundle up, it's global warming', which is written by the meteorologist Judah Cohen. He makes a great effort to show why the snow in Germany is a sign for global warming, too:

It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it. [Read the rest.]

And here he develops his argument in finest meteorologist talk:

The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.

Andrew Revkin does no hesitate do go into detail right here on his blog.
He is kind of critical of his overambitious colleague. With a good sense of humor, Mr. Revkin has this great video which shows the difference between weather and climate! (watch it, or else you will have to cool off in a prison cell, stupid!).

AGW can be appropriated by anyone looking for an explanation for any given weather phenomena, but just because this is a possible form of argument (and currently inevitable) does not mean it is persuasive even to those who take the reality of AGW seriously. However, for the general public who sees AGW science as singular, I imagine this reeks of inconsistency and convenience.

"AGW simply cannot be falsified." I don't think you're saying that right. Some climate scientist starts feeling his oats, and says, This may be the last snow ever for Great Britain. So he's being silly, and gets his comeuppance, and science learns a little bit more.But the fact that they aren't too good at detailed prediction doesn't mean that the basic predictions of AGW are wrong. Will global temperature go up 2/4/6 degrees in the next century, or not? That hasn't been falsified.

It can be, though. Maybe the real climate scientists here will hazard their own cutoffs? We've had a global temperature plateau for more than a decade now. How long can such a plateau last before the AGW hypothesis should be rejected? [Maybe I'm not asking the question properly - so please fix it.]

The possibility for falsification would certainly be most useful - also for building credibility of the concept of AGW. This should take the form if XXX happens in the next NNN years, this would be inconstent with the idea that GHGs are the major drivers of ongoing climate change. If XXX really happens (such as ongoing stagnation of globale mean temperature) in the future (!) NNN years, we would need to reconsider the AGW explanation; if it does not not happen, opponents should acknowledge that AGW is pretty good in consistentely exlaining ongoing change. Question is - how short/long would NNN have to be?

Question would also be: which part of the concept has been falsified?Did the two cold winters in Europe falsify AGW? I guess not. Did Katrina or the warm summer 2003 prove the reality of AGW? I do not think so.

I'd love to know what NNN is. But I'd add: I don't really care about CO2. I do care about global mean temperatures. If they don't go up in the next decade or two, even if AGW is true in some sense, I don't really care about it - unless you tell me that the temperatures are just being delayed somehow, and will suddenly jump up even more soon after.

I guess, science will need more time to find out how large NNN may be (and other details of the procedure). And, indeed, the question is not if CO2 increases temperatures, but if it is the main driver responsible for temperature increases, so that we may predict "if CO2 goes up like before, we will see a significant increase in temperatures - 2 degree and more at the end of this century". Falsification would mean that the assertion "... the temperature increase will be bound by 2 and less degree at the end of the century" has higher plausibility. For instance.

I think these meterologists may hurt the science more than they are aware off.They for sure put the question of AGW and CAGW into terms of value and belief.But climate or weather doesn't care about values, and most of us does not support rain dancers anymore.

New observations and incorporation of them in theories, hypothetis and models is the scientific approach and I do hope that resources will flow into the community without requirement to fulfill political goals.

Example:I am willing to pay taxes to get plausible explanations of the sudden drop in satellite measured global temperature from middle of November until today:(I have looked at 5 km in the graph you have to create by yourselves.)http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/

What about the "hotspot" in the tropsphere? Isn't that a clear prediction of AGW?

We should also note that a "falsification" does not have to be dramatic, but it shows the need to make a revision of the original theory. Of course a revised theory is, from a logical point of view, a new and different theory. But a falsification cannot tell us how much or how little things have to change. Only that it has to change. And it is a good scientific virtue to acknowledge if, and when, changes have been made.

Ingno, I understand that theories change. But I'm asking about a very specific change. As Dr. Storch put it, what needs to happen for scientists to reconsider whether CO2 is the major cause of climate change? What you're describing is believers in AGW finding ways to defend their theory by modifying it.

Yes, I agree. I merely wanted to point out some difficulties here. We often hear things like "It is worse than we believed". To which you may respond: "Oh, so you consider your previous theory falsified? (again)" :-)

Anyway, there is a vagueness about the "theory" you formulate. "... is the major cause for climate change". Does that mean that the only test-implication is about the future; in NNN years this will happen? Or are there test-implications that could be checked today?

I thought that the hot-spots was one such present day implication. But maybe I am wrong.

I am presently attending a conference on water resources and management in Singapore. When I met a person with a strong Australian accent, I approached him and asked him about the link of the present flooding and AGW. It turned out that the guy was a hydrologist, and worked in the field. His comment was - no, we do not see a general trend towards stronger or more rainfall. Of, course, one would have to have a longer perspective, not just the last 50 years since 1950, or so.

The unnamed meteorologist(s) mentioned by Rainer S may have overseen that the Pacific is presently in a La Nina phase, which favours rainfall in NE Australia. In general, Australia is famous for its large swings from heavy flooding to heavy droughts.

Nature (doi:10.1038/news.2011.701) reported on an interesting study by psychologists who examined the effect of dire climate change messages. Their main finding is:

"These results demonstrate how dire messages warning of the severity of global warming and its presumed dangers can backfire,paradoxically increasing skepticism about global warmingby contradicting individuals’ deeply held beliefs that the worldis fundamentally just. In addition, we found evidence that such dire messaging led to a reduction in participants’ intentions to reduce their carbon footprint—an effect driven by increased global-warming skepticism."

Yeph, Hans & Reiner:it's kind of a vicious circle: over-dramatization has contrary effects - "it led to a reduction in participants' intentions to reduce their carbon footprint". Fine. In case people would say that they are willing to reduce their carbon footprint, you would also blame them with the argument that it is useless to ride a bike - China, India etc are important. So, whatever people say in these experiments or tests, they will be blamed. Maybe that's what it is all about: everybody's a fool except me.

By the way, I am impressed by klimazwiebel-contributors' ability to completely ignore (bad) poetry.

Werner, the claim "it led to a reduction in participants' intentions to reduce their carbon footprint" was made in an article by other people in a scientific journal. It not true that all scientific statements are arbitrary, as you seem to imply. - Hans

Hans, I didn't say that all scientific statements are arbitrary. I just criticize a certain attitude or tendency in (social) sciences to talk about "the people" or "society" in contrast to "science". This differentiation has to be reproduced permanently. It is done so on the premises that people have to be governed by a rational government based on objective science. In order to establish power on these premises, it is important to show that people are stupid, deficient, and uneducated. Climate serves well to establish this seemingly "natural" order of things. People just "don't understand". But we should take care not to lose the real problem - climate change - out of sight. The problem with climate is that science has NO answer what this problem is really about. Thus, science is not the opposite of 'propaganda'; instead it is depend on propaganda in order to articulate more realistic and scientific results. Those results are neither arbitrary nor objective. This is what climate as an object of scientific interest teaches us: we have to find a new definition what science really means and produces.

Anonymous - I have no problem if you call it "Propaganda", but I would prefer to not to do.Werner - I mostly agree, but I found your comment on the nature article, with a direct reference to me, not fully fair.

@Hans 22Sorry for that. It was not my intention to identify you with the nature article! But it looks like, I agree. I should be more careful.

@anonymous 21Propaganda or not - you know what the intention is. If you want to raise alarm, you need propaganda. If you want to deny the problem, you need propaganda, too. If you prefer the middle ground, you also need propaganda. There is no neutral zone. This does not mean that science is impossible. It only means that it is not outside of the alarmist / skeptical dichotomy.

45 Participants doesn´t sound like great statistics. Quite daring to base a claim about correlation between world view ("just world") and attitudes reg. AGW on such a sample size.

Anyway,dire predictions DO backfire, simple because they as yet failed to materialize. Locking at my private "sample" - certainly larger than 45 - scaremongering is what virtually creates some sort of sceptics. And the ones I know definitely don´t think the world is just - whatever that is supposed to mean.

Judas Cohen says that more water wapors in the air due to global warming make more snow, covering Northern Hemisphere and cooling it. Hmmm - but the air then must be cold first, otherwise we would have heavy rains, instead of heavy show. So back to the point one - why is it now so cold by all that global warming?

Do you remember the very warm winter some years ago. No wind from the north could change anything.

And we must remember that heavy snow did let the alpine glaciers grow during the cold periods during the Little icage. Where did the moisture come from then?

I think that the weather patterns in our countries did really change since about 1990. Maybe they are changing again. Even if the summers were really very warm the last decades, one must admit that we also didn't have much snow in the Alps during the cold winters.

Werner wrote'Propaganda or not - you know what the intention is. If you want to raise alarm, you need propaganda. If you want to deny the problem, you need propaganda, too.'

among all stakeholders, who is not interested in propaganda ? I think these would be the persons that are truly interested in knowing more to then be able to take informed decisions. If you have a medical problem that requires action, the least you would wish are doctors that try to pitch particular interests, either economical or ideological. You would really wish neutral, technical and to-the-point information , including all possible uncertainties and certainties. However, it seems that in the climate discussion the opposite occurs more often. Judith Curry just made the observation that more technical weblogs that took her more time to prepare are the ones that elicit a smaller number of comments and questions, whereas the more controversial entries, just written in a few minutes but with high political content, trigger the largest number of comments. On a smaller scale, this can be observed also here at the Klimazwiebel.

But isn't opposing these different issues tricky? Do you want to make an argument in favor of technology over politics? This is an ideology itself, I guess. Technology substitutes politics - the list of failures is long, very long, Eduardo.

And concerning your doctor example: Al Gore made that before. He was wrong. You have to go to different doctors to make up your mind, because no doctor is free of an ideological and economic context. In the end, you have to make the decision on the basis of "informed uncertainty" - surgery or conservative cure? Antibiotics or staying longer in bed? Love or divorce? Geo-engineering or emission reduction or both? Ride a bike or not?

Of course, in general your observation concerning the weblogs is right. But in my (not validated) experience folks here on klimazwiebel like these endless debates on things technological. But there is not one comment on my delicate poetry!!!! Why does no one discuss the poetics of climate change? No one except me! Not even Judith Curry! Not even my doctor knows why that is!

no, I am not arguing for 'technological blogs', quite the contrary. I was observing the average behavior of the blog commenters - of course, the average is sometimes not a good description.

I try to flip the coin and imagine that all this controversial issue would be something in which I dont have much expertise, say stem cells for instance. If I really want to know more about stem cells, I think I would tend to pose more comments and questions to the technological entries, not exclusively, but indeed more frequently. I wonder why this is not the case. Perhaps because we all have a predetermined opinion and it is more fun to score political points.

Conclusion: appeal to technological/scientific knowledge is not very effective. Only a a few will benefit from it, but only those that are not interested in propaganda

Reiner, the Intergovernmental Poetry Commission on Climate change is a spiritual body. Poets of great merit review and assess the most recent poems produced by poets worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, to ensure an objective and complete assessment of current poetry. IPCC aims to reflect a range of views and expertise on poetics of climate change. The Secretariat of disembodied poetics coordinates all the IPCC work and liaises with Governments.

Thanks, Rainer S., we indeed have to set high standards (Richard Tol is already assessing our assessment criteria!). This here is non-official: we have to keep the Vogons out of the commission (they produce the third-worst poetry of the universe, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon)

Sustainable use of KLIMAZWIEBEL

The participants of KLIMAZWIEBEL are made of a diverse group of people interested in the climate issue; among them people, who consider the man-made climate change explanation as true, and others, who consider this explanation false. We have scientists and lay people; natural scientists and social scientists. People with different cultural and professional backgrounds. This is a unique resource for a relevant and inspiring discussion. This resource needs sustainable management by everybody. Therefore we ask to pay attention to these rules:

1. We do not want to see insults, ad hominem comments, lengthy tirades, ongoing repetitions, forms of disrespect to opponents. Also lengthy presentation of amateur-theories are not welcomed. When violating these rules, postings will be deleted.2. Please limit your contributions to the issues of the different threads.3. Please give your name or use an alias - comments from "anonymous" should be avoided.4. When you feel yourself provoked, please restrain from ranting; instead try to delay your response for a couple of hours, when your anger has evaporated somewhat.5. If you wan to submit a posting (begin a new thread), send it to either Eduardo Zorita or Hans von Storch - we publish it within short time. But please, only articles related to climate science and climate policy.6. Use whatever language you want. But maybe not a language which is rarely understood in Hamburg.